At Thinking Ahead, our latest fireside chat series ‘Charting AI in the Investment Industry’ explores how the investment landscape is evolving as artificial intelligence accelerates at an unprecedented pace.
In our latest episode, Roger Urwin, Co-founder of Thinking Ahead, and Sue Brake, Board Member of Dragonfly Thinking and former CIO of Future Fund, sit down with Louisa Minter-Kemp, Communications and Engagement Lead at Thinking Ahead. Sue has spent the past six months building over 60 AI agents in practice, and the conversation is as candid as it is practical.
She opens with a striking claim: she would not attempt a Total Portfolio Approach transformation today without AI. Not because it speeds things up, but because AI brings something no human committee member can: no need to belong, no fear of conflict, and no hesitation to point out the problem in the room when everyone else stays quiet.
The conversation spans a beliefs agent built to surface the disagreements investment committees avoid, a live systems map that changed how she thinks about risk, and what months of deep AI use does to your instincts. Her closing note is both exciting and sobering: organisations are too fully occupied to free up the people who most need this time, and the window to act is shorter than it looks.
Sue Brake, Board Member at Dragonfly Investing, discusses agentic AI, the need for systems thinking and experimenting with beliefs.
Key themes explored include:
- Why Sue believes TPA transformation is now unthinkable without AI
- The beliefs agent: what it revealed about LLMs, and how she fixed it
- Why AI’s lack of social instinct makes it uniquely useful in investment committees
- Systems thinking as a newly accessible skill and what it unlocks for risk
- The organisational urgency of carving out time before people feel steamrolled
Explore more on these topics:
- Follow this AI series and listen to Jaco van der Walt from RBC Global Asset Management and Mona Naqvi from CFA Institute
- Watch our Beliefs video series under our Governance research hub
- Explore our two hubs on Systems thinking and Technology and AI
Explore our website
- Our work – research content hubs and 2026 research activities
- Thinking about joining our global network? Find out more.
- Take a look at what events we have coming up or revisit our past events.
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